Thursday


23
Apr 20

More blooming things

Out for a little walk this fine, gray, damp, chilly, late April, oh look, now it’s raining Thursday afternoon. I saw an older couple out for a shuffling jog and I saw them again later as they walked back to their home. It seemed as apt as anything else out there.

There are a lot of sidewalks and some nice paths in our immediate vicinity. One of those paths is succumbing to a nearby storm pond, and so work must be done. I wonder how many people have been up to this sign and turned around. Not many. Most of us are just walking around it.

But I do it thinking of an old joke. Enough is enough!

These won’t be around much longer, so let’s document them now. On a turn in between condos there’s a tree on the corner and whoever lives there probably thinks of it as their tree. And that’s just fine.

So long as they don’t mind if I stop by taking photos of the blooms every now and then. “Oh, Charles, someone is out there again, taking pictures of our tree.”

It’s important, I decided, to be very deliberate about which direction you face when you do that, lest someone think you’re trying to peer into and photograph their living room.

These are a bit safer. They’re in our yard.

And thus, they are ours.

Ours. All ours.

But, still, you want to mind your background.

Heaven forfend you get the exterior of a neighbor’s house in the shot.


16
Apr 20

Listen to an actual pandemic expert, and also me

Another damp and gray day, so yesterday’s sunshine was all a ruse, a dastardly plot to lull one into a false sense of spring. Because why should you have a proper spring a month after actual spring began?

As burdens in life go, this is a small one. But if you’re going to tell me its spring, it should be spring. That’s not too much to ask. And it should be almost an article of faith. In fact in some cultures, it has been. But, as we are people of our times, let us put it in the modern context: if we can’t trust the planet who can we trust?

Probably the planet is getting us back for something we’ve done. No doubt we deserve it.

But think of these trees, these poor, tricked, trees!

Like we need things that can do this to deserve a sense of revenge …

Those are all photos from a week or so ago, pictures I took on my Canon and promptly forgot to upload. Now we’re giving them their fair shot at notoriety.

I talked to a real-life person today …

Epidemiologist Shandy Dearth is from the Fairbanks School of Public Health at IUPUI in Indianapolis. We talked about monitoring the pandemic’s progress and staying safe and a whole lot more.

 

I don’t know all of the ends and outs of an epidemiologist’s day, but I have enjoyed learning how they all talk about their work and the way they relate it to the rest of us.

After the interview we talked about types of epidemiologists. I figure, once I finally learn how to spell the word I should figure out what kind I want to be. Would I take on the casual, c’est la vie, attitude? Would I become a worry wart? Would I just figure the chips are going to fall wherever chips fall, and that’s into my mouth, after they’ve been on the floor? Would I be the founder of Extra Hands, LLC, a firm designed to do my work, so my hands never have to touch anything and get dirty? Would I drop a spoon and play devil-may-care since a dirty spoon shouldn’t separate me from dessert?

Epidemiologists must spend a lot of time in public resisting the urge to tell people to get their germy germs off my lawn and away from the water fountain.

But they do get to call themselves disease detectives, though, which is really cool.


9
Apr 20

A new work project!

I worked on the deck yesterday. Put an umbrella out there, sat in the shade, griped about some coding I was working on and just had a pleasant afternoon of it. Today it was a bit cooler out, and so my outside time was a four-mile run in the evening and a few minutes down at the creek bed.

So I picked up a few crinoids.

To me, these are symbols of happy days as a child, doing the very same thing, traipsing through creek beds, learning to walk on wet stones and not to be troubled by wet socks. I didn’t know what they were then, of course. And I certainly didn’t know what they were called.

Probably, I was told they were called Indian beads. They were worn by a few different cultures at different times around the world. They are, of course, fossilized sea creatures. Maybe I’ll try to clean out some of the clogged columnals and polish these things up. What’s the point of looking for them otherwise, aside from those memories, I mean.

You don’t need another point than that.

I launched a new program at work today. Four weeks ago I pitched an idea and it was well received. We are advertising for it, and in out-of-state markets, too. And, today, I am finally able to roll out the first part of phase one.

My pitch: We have nine campuses of experts in just about every field under the sun, let’s lean on that expertise and share it with the masses. (Who knew!?)

So that’s where On Topic with IU begins, talking to the university’s many experts

There’s a website and social media (Twitter and Facebook, maybe Instagram eventually) and you can hear more shows here.

Joe Fitter has some good advice for your household finances just now. He should. He’s got a great professional career under his belt and now teaches in one of the nation’s best business skills. Let’s bring forth the expertise!

The larger concept I proposed has a ton of potential. One day, I hope, I’ll be able to explore phase two and phase three as well.

More on Twitter, check me out on Instagram. There are more podcasts from work here and the slightly more hobbyist ones over on Podbean.


2
Apr 20

More evidence of spring

Standing in the sunshine in the backyard and feeling fine.

It’s a sentence I should be saying all the time now. But the weather here isn’t as predictable as all that. Nice to enjoy this today, though. Here’s one of our flowering trees:

I like leaves, but we’ve waited this long, dear new friend, why not let the blooms have the spotlight a bit longer?

I wonder what it means when the style and the stigma are different colors on the same branch, never mind the same tree.

Whoever planted this tree, I thank you. Wish you’d put in an entire lawn of them.

We’re due another fine day of weather tomorrow. That’ll be two in a row. Wonders, friends, never cease. Sometime they just take a while to arrive is all.


26
Mar 20

Fowl in not fair air

After yesterday’s sunny and fair 26-mile bike ride — which was the sixth bike ride of the year, and, thus, we should stop counting as the novelty of newness has very much given way to the annual complaint of “Why does it take so long to be able to ride around here?” — today we returned to the grayness and general ‘bleh’ that typifies four or five months of the year.

Which, hey, at least I can look out of windows and see it now?

Also ran in it today. Charming mood-setter, really.

Oh, but to get outside, though. Yes. It was outside. And no, it was not something to be desirous of today. I want to take the positive approach: We are able to do this thing! But the legs and the mind were not onboard with the effort today. So it was slow and sluggish and just something to be endured. Sometimes that’s a positive approach, too: Enduring. But today it was a po-tah-toe, rather than a potato, sort of thing.

This is wholly about the weather, and the reality that the weather is like this in late March, when I am in no mood for such a thing. Give me warmth or give me sun. Ideally, give me both, because we’re into spring everywhere in my various social media streams except for right here. But since I can’t have what I want, give me at least one of them.

Even the geese don’t want anything to do with this stuff.

You might say I’m projecting. I thought you might. When they flew over I asked them. I said, “Hey geese, am I projecting my feelings, in the sense that Sigmund Freud, and later, Karl Abraham, defined the concept, about these lame atmospheric conditions onto you?” Do you know what they said?

Honk.